THE MISTRESS WHISPERER? TOWN AND COUNTRY EXPOSE! and OPINION BY MISSY

TOWN AND COUNTRY MAG : INTELLIGENCE - DIVORCE - MISTRESS INVESTIGATIONS


I was going to excerpt from this article, which I read in the paper copy of February 2018's edition of Town and Country, but if you don't want to subscribe, try your local library for the full text.  In the article PI (or spy) Herman Weisberg is profiled as a "Mistress Whisperer" as part of a larger article about divorce among the wealthiest of us and the way art collections are assets that need to be divvied up.  A photo which appears to be actress Glenn Close in her role as a Mistress Gone Mad, also appears above the article.  The gist of this article is that Weisberg is the one who wealthy men in New York City call to go talk to Mistresses Gone Mad, Mistresses who start threatening they will expose their affairs to the wives, for instance.  He tracts them down and just talks them down from doing the things they are threatening to do to his clients.  Talks sense to them.


I found this article interesting because while certainly there are Mistresses Gone Mad out there, there are mostly a lot of people who took marriage vows who break them and who eventually go their separate ways sadly but without all the uproar.  So much depends on individuals and their personalities, their values, the way they do life.  But Mistresses Gone Mad are to me a stereotype, a furthering of the Home Wrecker stereotype, in which it is The Other Woman who is the problem, not the Husband, not the Wife.  The man who Keeps a Woman, who has access to money to do so without his wife knowing, seems to never take the blame.  If he cheats, it's never his wife who drove him to it.





The film Fatal Attractions was hot and also crazy.  Actor Michael Douglas and actress Glenn Close were the two having the affair.  When I watched this film, I saw a lot wrong in Close's character early on.  It was clear to me she was emotionally unstable and also that she had lied that she was up for a one time experience - no strings.  But predictably enough, Michael Douglas' character is perhaps more stable, but the one who really can have a one time fling.  Maybe his backstory is that he doesn't always or even often have flings, but you suspect he's had, and as the story goes he will go unpunished.  He's the married person and the person with children, more to loose and risk. It is his wife, trying to hold her family with children together, willing to take his confession as an apology, who goes after the mistress and violently. Of course the rabbit boiling in the kitchen pot scene is very threatening. This very successful film is a modern morality tale and it also communicates that what's exciting is the battle of two women for a man.  I feel Close did such a good acting job that it stereotyped her as a person.


If you are a wealthy married man risking an affair or actually Keeping a Mistress, which isn't the same thing, you need to think it through before you ever have to hire a PI or spy to talk to your Mistress Gone Mad!  Have you entered into this extramarital relationship to help you get through a divorce or maintain a marriage?  Have you done your best to end your relationship without the rancor?  Or does it excite you to have two (or more) women fighting over you? Have you been fair to her financially?


By my way of thinking, if you've been Keeping a Mistress, and the break off or your divorce is going to impoverish her, that is not fair of a wealthy man.  I think you should provide her enough money to continue to pay her rent for a year and you should also set it up with your attorney to pay for her education, if that will help her towards financial independence.
Divorce occurs in California as a Community Property State when two people divide all assets in half.  In some states there are other considerations.  One of my friends experienced moving to another state with her long term husband who - it took her years to realize it - was willing to lie and set the whole thing up and put in a couple years elsewhere - so he would not have to split their assets in half.  She found herself calling him to ask him to pay for her reeducation since the move meant leaving a long term job she loved and not having the retirement she would have if she stayed.  A couple years later he moved back to California and was soon married to someone who I believe was his Other Woman years before.  The focus here is on Community Property, and I've heard of wives who hire experts to track down assets they didn't know about.  But wealthy men, hear me out.  If half of all you own has always been yours, use your half for Keeping a Mistress, if you must.
To the Mistresses out there who are deeply in love with the wealthy man who Keeps them, and who have taken themselves out of the "available" pool, perhaps given up jobs or careers to be available to travel, and so on, please try not to be the Mistress Gone Mad though you are heartbroken and stressed.
You've made many decisions and choices, small and large, along the way, so own up to it.


That is All For Now!
Missy


C 2018 All Rights Reserved

CIGARETTES

NOT PRETTY ENOUGH - HELEN GURLY BROWN - MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

Readers of COSMOPOLITAN magazine, those who remember Helen Gurley Brown as the ultimate career-woman who was editor for many years and those who don't, will be interested in this biography which isn't the one Helen herself would have written.  Helen Gurley Brown (married to David Brown, a film producer), came up the hard way, had a sister and mother to support, and made it to Los Angeles at a time when most women were not career oriented.  Most women of her generation who worked quit when they got married, or when they were married with children.
HGB wrote more than one book in her lifetime.  "Sex and the Single Girl," came before her editorship, and was almost an expose on the fact that yes single women had sex.  It was full of girl-friendly advice. Because of it she was linked with Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Magazine empire in pop culture and overall was not considered a feminist.  (There was but one nude male centerfold in her years at Cosmo and that was of actor Burt Reynolds with his belly button near the staples airbrushed.)  HGB also wrote a couple of fun memoirs of sorts with confessionals such as that she bit her toenails.  No one could accuse this extremely hard working woman, who did marry "late" and never had children, of not having a sense of fun or humor.


According to author Hirshy, HGB often used real life examples in her own books, taking the experiences she had with one man and turning him into a variety of characters for instance, and what makes reading her books and then the "reality," more difficult is that HGB often had many simultaneous sexual relationships going on.  Some of her best women friends found that concerning.


HGB publically acknowledged in interviews that married men have affairs, how dumb could you be to not know that!  She was pro-Choice.  She had been hired and fired or quit dozens of secretarial jobs that included sex before she finally got that editorship when she was near forty years old and her husband helped her get it.


But why the title "Not Pretty Enough?"  On the cover of the book we see a photo of a happy HGB who is wearing fashionable clothing and cosmetics and has big hair to be envied.  Perhaps it's because HGB often referred to herself and women like her as "Mouseburgers."
She /they were not handed any advantages.  They had to self-improve.  This she did. She self improved not only with cosmetics and fashion, but exercise and diet.  She improved her apartment locations and her interiors.  She also improved on her friendships.  Never one to forget poverty or prioritizing her mother and sister, Helen could pinch a penny and was seen taking public buses.  She saved for years to buy her own auto.
What my readers here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot will find most interesting about this book is Helen's affairs.  I'm not going to ruin all that by telling it all.
So get yourself comfortable and crack open the book!


C 2018 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

DE LA TOUR EIFFEL

IS THERE ANY CHANCE THAT A POOR GIRL CAN MARRY A RICH MAN REALLY?

Dear Missy,
Reading your blog, I feel it's like the girls growing up poor can think about becoming mistresses but can't actually marry a rich man.  The rich men want women who have their own money to marry, right?  Is there any hope for us poor girls?

Cindy

Dear Cindy,
Yes.  Of Course!
But consider that...
A poor girl can be beautiful without trying to be but she may need help choosing the right clothes, cosmetics and hair style.  She can be very intelligent but needs education to become well rounded and an expert at something.  She can be sweet, kind, a nice person, but she needs to develop her understanding of etiquette and manners.  She may have a better chance today than ever before to make it into the moneyed classes without prejudice.  Often she has to start over in a new or bigger city to begin.  Small towns don't seem to offer much opportunity.
It's better to do these things for yourself, have your own individuality and work you are good at and enjoy, before you meet a man, or else you might find yourself with one who dictates to you, who creates a woman as he wants her to be. Some women consider such a man to be a control freak and they grow up and rebel by escaping him.

Also, you do not have to become someone's mistress or someone's wife or be in a relationship at all if you have made choices for yourself to become independent.  I will stop short at saying that everything is choice because that isn't true and never was.  It's a good idea to know where you'd like to go though.
Remember that very few are born into wealth or live on inherited wealth their entire lives.
Missy

OLD KEY

COCO and HER NAZI SPY LOVER BARON HANS GUNTHER VON DINCKLAGE

Coco and the Baron, who was called "Spatz," had a liaison of a decade duration and she seems to have chosen love over politics.


In 1944 when Paris was liberated the women who were known to have slept with Nazi/German soldiers during the time in which it was occupied were dragged through the streets, had their heads shaved to embarrass them, and worse.  Chanel was brought to the FFI headquarters for questioning but was released quickly, according the author Vaughan, due to the intercession of Winston Churchill.  She and Churchill had been friends for thirty years at that point, and he saved her from trial as a German collaborator. She was 61 to Dincklages' 48, and after the questioning she went to Switzerland, a neutral country, to meet up with him.


In 1946 the French Court of Justice issued a warrant to bring Chanel back to France for questioning, but not because of her Nazi spy lover.  This time she was accused of collaboration with a French traitor to give information to Germany military intelligence.  She denied all accusations and the author states that at that time the extent of her involvement was unknown, implying that if they had known she would not have been let to go.


Was the nickname CoCo based on  the French word Cocotte, for Kept Woman?  Well, she had been.  Born in 1883 as one of six children living in peasant poverty, by 1895 when her mother died and then abandoned by her father, she was raised by nuns where she learned discipline and frugality.  Her need to survive after leaving the nunnery lead her to singing in a cabaret to becoming,at 23, the Mistress of wealthy Etienne Balsan.  For three years she lived with him without marriage, learned to ride horses and the ways of the wealthy.  Following this relationship, CoCo spent eleven years with Arthur "Boy" Chapel beginning in 1908, so from approximately age 25 to age 36.  Neither man could or would marry her.  So no doubt CoCo had been a Kept Woman.


During the World War I era she lived in a Paris apartment.  Boy married (but still kept CoCo as a lover). He was the love of her life but as a result of his death in 1920 in a traffic accident she learned by the bequests in his will that he also had an Italian countess as a Mistress.  It is unstated in the book but clearly there was thus more to his choice of bride than class if he also kept an Italian countess!


CoCo had also made a best friend of Misia, Marie Sophie Olga Zenaide Godebska, who had come to London at 18 and had a series of trysts with older men.  Misia inherited a large sum of money at age 20.  These two bonded as unconventional artists and it is implied might have enjoyed a lesbian relationship or been two cougars out looking for men.
CoCo meanwhile had diversified.  Despite all her hard work, talent, and enterprise in fashion it took hiring a perfumer to invent for her approval and her own promotion a perfume, Chanel No. 5 to become a truly wealthy woman in her own right.  It was enough that in 1918 she paid 300,000 gold francs to buy her villa at Biarritz. By 1920 she had enough money to become a patron of the arts and to buy a house in Paris.


Her meeting with the Baron was likely at her Villa or nearby.  He had German aristocracy and military officers in his heritage and was against Communism.  He is said to have become a spy by 1919, the World War I era, long before World War II.  Spatz "used men and seduced women without mercy" He was "urbane and well mannered", multilingual, had a warm personality but was not an Aryan playboy. He wore the diplomats cloak of immunity.  No one was in physical danger around him. (chapter 2 page 32 of 112+)


Meanwhile, the author characterizes CoCo in the 1920's as always on the prowl for male conquests and lists them. One of them, poet Piere Rverdy, was one she loved and provided material assistance to so that he could go on writing.  He and CoCo had a "deep friendship" of 40 years.  She also had a liaison with Russian Grand Duke Dmitre Paulovich, a contender for the Russian throne, who, like other lovers, inspired her fashion designs, in his case her "Slavic Period."  He helped her launch Chanel No. 5 perfume in 1921 when it was promoted as the luxury perfume, with its very complicated formulation that included chemicals not from natural floral sources.  It was made by the Pierre Wertheimer Company in large enough batches to meet demand.  The author contends that she was nonchalant or reckless to do business with them or acting while in depression over the end of an affair... I bring this all up because while the question of CoCo Chanel as a woman living for love and around lovers rather than an astute business woman is suggested by the author, I see that she may actually have enjoyed multiple and ongoing relationships - been poly-amorous.  Was she aggressive and canny?  Simply determined to infiltrate society, even though rejected as a potential wife due to her birth as a peasant?  Bisexual or experimental?  Was her upset at the Wertheimer's unreasonable but attributed to "ant-Semitism"?  Her perfume was a worldly success but it was not until 20 years had gone by and the World War II era that she realized she'd been screwed by them and yes, once she got mad she would not stop saying so.
And now she was also supposed to be homophobic?
And a long time user of morphine?  Doping herself up to party?  While she had 300+ employees and a business to run - and save?


As previously stated, the condemnation of CoCo in this book made me question it as an unbalanced reportage determined to condemn her as a Nazi collaborator with the only excuse for her behavioir being her need for a man in her life.  However, would Winston Churchill, the man said to have been instrumental in Britain's involvement in the War and salvation of it, really have stuck his neck out to save her just because they were friends?  Is that something you would do for a friend if you knew they were going to be outed on the world stage for behavior acceptable at one time (at least among a minority) that is now not politically correct?
Many people in the 1930's and 1940's felt that Russian Communism was to be feared.  The Russian Revolution had left Europe scared. Other countries did not want a revolution or hordes overrunning their country on the way out of Communism.  In occupied countries during World War II, and probably every war that ever was, there were diverse opinions that went unspoken because people were just too afraid.  Just like in a typical corporation.
This book has left me wondering about all the women who are liberal Democrats in love with stalwart Republican men who basically avoid political discussions and focus on happy domesticity and the home as a refuge from the world.  It has also made me wonder if the long dead Chanel's company has been currently targeted by people who don't want Jewish women to buy the clothes or the perfume.


C 2018 Book Report/Review  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved.

GRANDE ROUE DE PARIS

SETTLE FOR A GENTLEPERSON : OPINION BY MISSY

If you want to commit yourself to a man, heck, if you even want to date him, first make sure he is a gentleperson.

One day I went to the store down the street to pick up just a few small items and when I got there I encountered one of those unexpected sales you can't resist.  I figured I'd manage to walk home with my purchases which were more bulky and awkward than heavy.  However, I soon enough realized I was struggling to keep holding onto the plastic bags that were slipping out of my grip.

On this walk home I encountered three men, all neighbors who I had met and talked to a few times, none actual friends.

One of them yelled across the street at me, "Why didn't you get a cart?"  And kept walking.  His tone was critical and he was totally unhelpful and in my area one does not leave a lot with a cart.

The next man saw me and kept walking without saying anything to me, just waved.

The next man came up to me and said, "Can I help you with your packages?"

Guess which one is a GENTLEMAN?

OK, so basically women, men have, even as little boys sometimes, sought to be HELPFUL to a woman who is struggling with packages, could be helped by opening or holding a door, or other small efforts.  (Even offering to carry your grade school books home!) If a man is attracted to or interested in a woman he may actually look for the opportunity to make efforts to help her just to be noticed by her. So men, if you are interested in a woman and you notice that she could use a little help, doing so may just be what makes her interested in you.

I wanted to find out more about these three men.

One of them has always worked but of late had been through a few that he quit rather than have a new boss try to train him a new way.  He was divorced and had supported his children but had no one special in his life.  Previously he had flirted with me.

Another of them lost his business after the building he was established in was slated for tear down and was temporarily living in his RV which is not uncommon in my area.  He had never been married and was without any children to support but had been, I learned some time later, in many relationships through the years.  It's not that being NMNK (never married no kids) is indicative of anything wrong with a person.  It's a choice.  Let's just say that in his case he might have wanted to be free of responsibility.

The one who offered to help me was married, had two children, was working full time and going to school at night to slowly earn his Masters so he could get a better job and support all of them better.  Yes, he is the one that offered help, and as he was not interested in me he was doing so because he is nice and not to impress me enough to go out with him.

Women, a man offering you a little help like this does not damage your independence or feminism. This is about a person offering another person aid, being helpful and kind.  You too can be a GENTLEPERSON.

There is nothing wrong with testing the men you have in your life, as neighbors, associates, co-workers, and friends, as lovers, boyfriends, by asking them for some needed help around the house or some other effort and seeing what their response is.  Then you can decide which ones are KEEPERS!

Missy

L'HOTEL DE VILLE PARIS

CO CO CHANEL - NAZI and SPY or SOCIETY WOMAN in LOVE?

*A version of the book is subtitled "Nazi Agent" Was her

"Secret War" to keep her business?

Gabriella "CoCo" Chanel

1882 - 1971

In June of 2011, I elected CoCo Chanel, as Mistress of the Month.  Here she is again, this time as a possible spy for Nazi Germany. She grew up in a convent where she'd been left as a child when her mother died by a father who didn't want his children.  Her way out of being the equivalent of a foster child who had to make it alone was to sing for her supper, and become a Mistress. Lovers financed her attempts at business, as a hat maker and then as a revolutionary and renown fashion designer who became wealthy from sales of her signature perfume Chanel  No. 5 and had over 2500 employees, mostly women, when the Nazis took over Paris.  She never had a marriage or children herself, but she was generous to her family, the education of her sister's children.  She also is known to have financed men she was interested in, having achieved independence and unusual success "for a woman."
Chanel succeeded through enterprise and creativity, and though she rose up in society to have both the exiled Duke of Windsor and his wife, the Duchess Wallis Simpson, and hero Winston Churchill as friends.
The author of this book, Hal Vaughan, exposes her relationship with spy Baron Hans Gunther Von Dincklage, called Spatz, and we wonder how much did she know. I don't believe she ever forgot what it was to be impoverished, orphaned, or living in the class system that made men choose more suitable well born women as wives.  But consider CoCo often said and was quoted as believing that it was essential for a woman to have a man in her life, to be in love, to love.  She had many disappointments and heartbreaks before she ever met Spatz, a charming younger man living in the South of France, with a half Jewish wife, who came across as more Upper Crust English than German.  She was in her fifties and he in his forties when they became involved.

As you may know from reading my blog, I read every book I feature from cover to cover, and in the last year or so have been reading some books as audio books. Doing so has opened the time I have to read and I especially love it when an author reads their own work.  However, I must tell you upfront that this book as an audio book was a total turn off.  The woman reader (Why when the author is a man?) had such condemnation of CoCo in her sneering attitude and intonations that I couldn't bear to continue to listen to her.  It gave the impression that this "International Best Seller" existed condemn and give an unbalanced account of CoCo.  I winced hearing this aggressively negative voice.
I decided to give reading the old fashioned text a try, and found this was a story that built and had much research to it.  But I was not swayed to the point that I might think that CoCo should have been tried as a war criminal just because while designing costumes very briefly in Hollywood in 1931 (including Gloria Swanson) that she noticed it was run by Jews. 

That Hollywood films were and are made by Jewish people, particular male studio heads was in fact true in her era (and still is dominated by Jewish people), and perhaps this truth spoken is misinterpreted as Anti-Semitism.  For if she really were, would she have lent her name?  Or is it being implied that she herself was just greedy and irresponsible to her contract? If she was truly anti-Semitic then she probably would have not accepted the commission from a Jewish studio boss. She was paid very well - a million - but didn't need the money. If truly anti-Semetic she probably would not have made a deal on her perfume with a Jewish company in the first place. (Her costumes were not successful and she considered Hollywood too glittery and false.)
Nor do I ever find convincing generalizations that Catholics and Christians were raised to believe that Jews killed Jesus.  I never heard that personally from any pulpit or in school or out of the mouth of anyone I knew; some people may have thought that but then they are ignorant of the Roman-occupied culture during Jesus' time.
That she felt ripped off by the Jewish-owned perfume company that made most of the profit on her perfume, is true.  She legally battled with them but eventually let them buy her out, so to speak.  She might have done so of any business partner. In a 1924 deal to have her perfume produced to meet great demand, she soon felt swindled and spent the next 25 years saying so, but her perfume is what provided her most of her wealth.
What I wanted was the cold hard facts of CoCo's involvement with Nazi's sans the Baron. Can be believe he admitted to her that he was a spy and asked her to work with him? That the Baron was a special man to her as a woman, that's where CoCo may have been played.  He was known to be a seducer.  He was there in the South of France to infiltrate society that lived there, as did CoCo live some of the time.  He was there to report on Naval operations. That was his secret job. Frankly if I knew someone had married a Jewish or half-Jewish woman I would not assume they were a Nazi.
It's also that she may have played him and others with one objective which may sound selfish, but that is to survive as her world crumbled around her, to continue her business that she had to shut down and leave, to keep her employees, to continue to help her family.  When she finally got out of Paris before the occupation, her employees mostly having fled to the countryside, people starving and in the streets, in bitter cold without heat, it was to her family that she fled.  So what if she could afford a chauffer and a Rolls Royce?  Wasn't she just as entitled to be afraid for her life?

And so if we focus on what the author dug up about the Baron, who was no doubt a spy for Nazi Germany, we can start there. 
In the 1930's CoCo was worth in today's money about $230 million dollars. In the mid 1930's Adolph Hitler's second in command, Joseph Goebbels - who controlled all media - approved Baron Hans Gunther Von Dincklage as a special attaché to the German Embassy in Paris.  French intelligence as well as Swiss intelligence was watching him.  He was part of a "cell" of several hundred Nazi intelligence people in France.  But intelligence may have been keeping an eye on the Baron while CoCo may have been one of many kept ignorant - at least for a while. The Baron's wealth was not close to hers.  He was set up and being paid by Germany.

In Paris the Ritz Hotel became an island of wealth where the elite people moved to live as if there were no war.  Chanel lived there as well as having a workspace and apartment across the street from the back door. The author makes the case that Chanel and some of her dear friends were morphine addicts for much of their lives, and that Chanel used the drug due to the depression she felt when yet another man she loved died suddenly - though this is repeated in the book as fact, it didn't seem to be substantiated, however, let's accept it and think "OK she had weaknesses."
During World War I, one tenth of French men died fighting.  No one wanted to believe another World War would begin but in 1939 when panic hit Paris, there were no taxis, no telephones, and 4 million French fled south, often on foot, ahead of the German army.  By then a lot of people were sorting through garbage cans outside of restaurants to solve their hunger pangs.

Dincklage divorced his wife Maximiliane a few months before the Nuremberg laws of 1934 deprived her of her citizenship.  No one knows for sure when Chanel met Dincklage, but he was married then and he did not divorce for CoCo but to be in compliance with the Nazi regime according to the author.  She testified when questioned after the war that they knew each other for 25 years.

The political and economic conditions in Europe had people choosing sides, even sides that were not winning. People thought that Communists, Socialists, and Fascists wanted to take over France.  Germany and England were not so much considered the enemy but Russians - Bolsheviks - many who were Jewish - were.  People feared a Russian Revolution scenario in France.  As a friend to the exiled Duke of Windsor, who had given up his Kingship for the woman he loved, his Mistress Wallis Simpson, CoCo had taken to meeting up with them and other friends in Switzerland.  Winston Churchill and his son Randolph were also visitors and friends - in England - and in France - and in Switzerland.  Hitler promised that he would reinstall the Duke of Windsor as the British King when Germany won the war.  The Duke and Duchess went to meet Hitler and famously photographed happily shaking hands. If you are social with such people, who are of a more elite status than you, would you follow their lead?
Seven years ago in June 2011 CoCo Chanel, the woman said to have been responsible for dramatically changing the fashion and style of womens' wear, was our Mistress of the Month.  You might want to go back to that month for an overall more balanced view.  As for other Nazi Mistresses, I spent a whole month on them in November 2017.
This book seems to make the case that CoCo was, rather than once in her twenties a love sick woman who struggled with the early limitations of desperate poverty, a more of an experienced and worldly Mistress of more men than previously revealed in films and books.  Throughout her adult life she had relationships, she loved, she was sexual. Her men were of various ethnic backgrounds that influenced her designs. Instead of thinking that the early heartbreaks left her focused only on designing clothes, and perfume, we can think of CoCo who was a woman of business with a sense of responsibility to her employees and family, not just herself. The most convincing part of the book is that she took a trip to Germany and indeed met a Nazi leader herself.


A little later in this month of posts, I'll write more about the relationship CoCo had with the Nazi Spy that I learned from this book.  I would like my readers to ask themselves if they have kept a relationship going with a man after learning something negative about how he conducts business or treats other people.

C 2018 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Including International and Internet Rights Reserved.